Known computer-based educational systems typically include a plurality of student terminals, but do not necessarily include a terminal for the teacher to communicate with the students. In these instances, active teaching may take place away from the network or off-line. The present invention is concerned with the teacher being on-line as an active participant.
Known computer-based education systems rely on a pre-authored stored lesson program, comprising a multiplicity of frames. Lessons are delivered in either Social Mode, which means that the teacher advances a group of students through a lesson, frame by frame, via the teacher's computer, or in Self-paced Mode (also called Independent Mode) where each student individually advances at his or her own pace through a lesson, frame by frame, while the teacher observes the work on the teacher's monitor. Such a system, involving a single teacher, is described in J. Ziv-El, U.S. Pat. No. 5,263,869 issued Nov. 23, 1993, a prior patent of the inventor herein.
Another system, including both Social and Self-paced Modes, in which a single teacher teaches clusters of students in remote places is described in J. Ziv-El, U.S. Pat. No. 5,437,555 issued Aug. 1, 1995, another prior patent of the inventor herein.
The above single teacher systems are based on a multiplexor polling system which communicates on an individual byte basis, which is ideal for the applications described there, since the logic operates on a character by character basis. However, where multiple teachers may be involved on a large school-wide network and require a central database, packet switched networks have cost advantages, particularly if the network is used by the school for a variety of applications.
The problem is that while packet-switched networks have greater data throughput, each packet may comprise 512 bytes or more. The present process may require only a single or a very small number of bytes per package, along with overhead data needed for addressing, checksums and error correction. Thus there are speed limitations with the way existing packet switched networks, such as those running on the IPX/SPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange/Sequenced Packet Exchange) protocol, or TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), can be used for educational exercises, which require the automatic provision of reinforcement feedback signals to a large number of students.
It is one object of the present invention to provide letter-by-letter or final letter reinforcement feedback signals in packet-switched networks at the speed that students type. It is clear that the problems will show up in larger networks, and networks with greater distribution of teachers and students.
In many existing systems, a student responds to a question and then must press the "Enter" key before the system informs the student whether the student entry is right or wrong. This provides two disadvantages. The first is the introduction of a period of anxiety in the interval between typing the last character of the response and getting the feedback signal for learning reinforcement. The second is the inability of the student to know, while still typing, whether he or she is on the right track.
It is important that a teacher is able to monitor in real time, a large number of student responses simultaneously, and receive information on their correctness, even while students are still busy typing, i.e. with very little delay between a student typing a character and the teacher seeing the character typed. This is in contrast to asking a question and then giving students a predetermined time in which to respond to the question before seeing their responses. During the waiting period for completed responses, the teacher is essentially off-line. The latter method not only wastes time with fast students, but also may cut short slow students. A teacher often asks a question, but in view of the responses of the first few students to respond, may desire to stop the current responses, and re-phrase the question, thereby saving time in progressing through the lesson. Also, if the teacher were to come back on-line only after responses had been completed, the students would be forced to wait while the teacher reviewed the responses, which is unacceptable for most teachers. Abrahamson et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,002,491 issued Mar. 26, 1991, describes a system which does not provide fast reinforcement feedback to the students as described, and which does not allow the teacher to see responses of a large number of students simultaneously, or information on their correctness, as they are being typed.
There are also many limitations with the way known lesson programs are constructed. Typically, a frame includes the question, which is to appear in a given layout on a student's screen with a designated place for the response, and the correct answer. A limitation with this approach is that the response is often not as valuable to the teacher as the explanation on how the response, whether right or wrong, was derived.
There are various exercise types that can be programmed into a lesson for automatic marking for correctness of student responses. These exercise types include multiple choice questions; question & short answer(s), which requires one or more short answers to a question; a requirement to fill in specific words into specific places in a sentence (fill-in-the-blanks) and the laying out of a specific list of characters in a pattern on the screen, for example, that which is required in a long multiplication of two multi-digit numbers (route).
Current authoring methods are cumbersome for the creation of some exercise types, in particular fill-in-the-blanks and route types, because it involves the laying out of the question with the correct size spaces where the fill-ins are to occur and the separate listing of the words or characters which are to be filled in, and finally, the indication of the correct order of these words. Since speed is essential when a teacher authors a question online while teaching, a better method of executing the authoring and transmission of these exercise questions is needed.
It is also desirable to give teachers a system which would enable a teacher to verbally ask a question, receive all the responses, score them, provide positive reinforcement feedback to students, obtain a statistical record of performance and have a written record for later review of this whole process, particularly including the question.
Another limitation with existing lesson programs is that the final score immediately after a lesson is completed, only reflects whether students have responded to particular questions correctly or incorrectly, according to the programmed answer. Unanticipated correct responses are scored as incorrect, without regard as to whether in the view of the teacher, a response is partly correct, thereby deserving an intermediate score.
Similarly, if the question is programmed to give a student a reinforcement feedback signal for a correct response, students who have given unanticipated correct responses do not receive reinforcement. Also a teacher is unable to selectively encourage a student with a learning disability who has a partially correct response, by giving this student a correct reinforcement feedback signal, to the exclusion of non-disabled students with the same response.
There is also a need in a classroom, in which students are working in a Self-paced Mode, for the teacher to be able to send a message to a student who is still busy with a response that the teacher is not satisfied with it, without disturbing the other students, so that the student is interrupted and forced to acknowledge the response, possibly with a comment of his own.
There is also a need for a lesson type, to be referred to as hybrid mode, in which Self-paced Mode frames are interspersed between social mode frames, so that a teacher may give self-paced exercises to students while basically teaching in social mode.
When a teacher teaches in Social Mode with a prepared lesson program while advancing frame by frame, each advance usually comprises several keystrokes, including indicating the next frame number, displaying to the students a message or question on the Class Display, actuating any Audio Visual (A-V) Media which are programmed into the lesson, and finally the teacher must press a key to signal to the students that the teacher requests responses. A problem with this frame driven approach is that the operation of the system by the teacher is more difficult to learn. Hence, there is also a need for a function where by pressing a button, the lesson advances, task by task, i.e. it is task driven, where every keystroke is educationally more meaningful by skipping intermediate operational steps.
In the case of a school-wide computer network, with several teachers teaching simultaneously in different classrooms, each with a multiplicity of groups, there must be no perceptible degradation of the speed with which all students are provided with reinforcement signals on a character by character basis.
There is also a need to maintain a log-on procedure which binds a class of students to a particular teacher, whether the system uses a wired or a wireless network, or portable computers. There is also a need here for showing the student seat numbers, with the student names and responses, for identification purposes.
There is also a need to maintain a common single database on lessons and student and teacher performance in the whole school. There is also a need for students who are not present in a classroom through illness or for other reasons, to join the students in the classroom through the Internet, without a perceptible degradation of the speed with which these students are provided with reinforcement signals.
There is also a need for the teacher to be able to take a student's response and not only place it on the Class Display for viewing and verbal discussion, but also to broadcast it on the screens of students, who are partaking in the same lesson, particularly if they are located remotely on the Internet.
The present invention overcomes the limitations outlined and introduces new benefits to on-line teaching systems.